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Spectacles Interviews
A Brief Interview With Jon Lewis
By Jeff Mason
What can we expect to find in Spectacles?
Each issue is going to contain three main stories — two stand-alone
pieces starting with the ones in issue one ("Eye of Potential Harm", and
"Land of the Early Bird"), and an eight-to-ten-page installment of a long
continuing story called "The Frost Changes" which has been simmering in
my head for several years now.
How do these stories differ from each other?
The stand-alone stories are fairly realistic in tone and concern episodes
in the lives of various citizens of "Seemington," a thinly veiled version
of Seattle; "The Frost Changes" is a bit more fantastic — it's set
in an unidentified "northern city" that's a combination of contemporary
Minnesota and pre-industrial Norway. There's average joes, confused teenagers,
ministers with magic powers, and creatures and phenomena drawn from Norse
folklore and legend. I think that having these two kinds of story in each
issue will make for a very complementary reading experience.
The work for which you've most been known thus far, True Swamp,
was about intelligent, speaking animals and their problems out in the
wilds. What made you start doing stories about normal human beings in
the familiar setting of the city?
I think that one thing stories do for people is to allow them to escape
from, or at least take a breather from, their own world. To travel to
an exotic or imaginary time or place for awhile. I wanted to try to make
the time and place of here and now seem exotic and just as worth escaping
to as any fantasyland. I'm doing these stories out of a sincere conviction
that every person's live contains strangeness, poetry and fantastic details...
things worthy of a story.
What about the continuing story? What inspired that weird setting?
Well, I grew up in Minnesota and have an immense affection for the
human and natural landscape there. Minnesota is a very Scandinavian place,
climactically and socially, and I'm mostly Norwegian myself, so I've ended
up being very interested in Norse folklore and legends. I've had a story
idea for years about the complicated intrigues between three men who all
assume disguises, abandon their identities, for completely different reasons,
and end up sitting together at a bar. I wanted to set this story in Minnesota,
but when I thought of infusing it with these old Scandinavian beliefs,
which I've also been wanting to work with for years, then the story really
came alive for me, and I'm going to try to pack a lot of development into
each installment for the readers.
Images, characters and likenesses © and TM Jon
Lewis